Metafiction as a Form of Mourning

There is a moment in Javier Cercas's Soldiers of Salamis when the narrator — a journalist named Javier Cercas — admits that he cannot verify the central fact of his own story. He has spent months investigating a single act of wartime mercy. He has interviewed witnesses, consulted archives, reconstructed the scene from every available angle. And still he cannot be certain. The book does not hide this uncertainty. It places it at the center of the narrative, where it remains, unresolved, until the final page.

I have returned to that book many times while working on my own novel. Not because I am trying to imitate it, but because it solved a problem I did not yet know how to name. The problem is this: what do you do when the historical record is incomplete, contradictory, or simply silent — and you are a writer who cares too much about honesty to pretend otherwise?

The traditional answer has been to fill the gaps with imagination and present the result as seamless. The historical novel, in its conventional form, is a confidence trick: it asks the reader to forget that the writer was not there. It reconstructs the past with such authority that the seams become invisible. This is a legitimate technique. It has produced extraordinary books. But it carries a cost that I find increasingly difficult to pay.

Laurent Binet understood this cost. In HHhH, his novel about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, he interrupts the narrative repeatedly to confess his own doubts, correct his own errors, and argue with himself about the ethics of what he is doing. The book is as much about the impossibility of writing the book as it is about the events it describes. Some readers found this frustrating. I found it the most honest thing I had read in years.

What Binet and Cercas share — and what I would call the metafictional impulse in historical writing — is a refusal to pretend that the distance between the present and the past has been closed. They write from inside that distance. They make it visible. And in doing so, they produce something that feels, paradoxically, more truthful than a novel that pretends the distance does not exist.

I want to suggest that this impulse is not merely a literary technique. It is a form of mourning. When we mourn, we do not resolve our grief. We do not arrive at a clean narrative that explains the loss and assigns it meaning. We circle the absence. We return to it. We hold it up to different lights and find that it looks different each time. Mourning is the acknowledgment that something is gone and cannot be fully recovered — and that the attempt to recover it is nonetheless worth making.

This is precisely what the metafictional historical novel does with the past. It does not claim to resurrect the dead. It claims only to sit with them for a while, in full awareness of the gulf that separates the living from those who are gone. The writer appears on the page not as an authority but as a mourner — someone who has done the research, read the documents, interviewed the survivors, and still does not know everything, and says so.

In the Dominican Republic, the official memory of the Trujillo era has been constructed and reconstructed many times. Heroes have been elevated, villains simplified, and the vast middle ground — the collaborators, the bystanders, the people who survived by making compromises they spent the rest of their lives not talking about — has been largely erased. The archive is incomplete. The testimonies are partial. The truth, whatever it is, lies somewhere in the space between the documents that exist and the documents that were destroyed.

A novel that pretended to fill that space with certainty would be lying. A novel that acknowledged the space — that made the incompleteness part of its structure, that showed the writer searching and doubting and revising — might be telling a different kind of truth. Not the truth of what happened, exactly. The truth of what it feels like to try to find out.

That is the novel I am trying to write. Whether I am succeeding is a question I cannot answer yet. But I have come to believe that the attempt itself — the visible, honest, sometimes failing attempt — is the only form of historical fiction I can make with a clear conscience. Everything else feels like a confidence trick. And the dead, I think, deserve better than that.